Day: May 24, 2012

American Muslims who are disheartened by increasingly fervent attacks on sharia law are planning to assemble en masse this weekend to protest against what they fear are attempts to discriminate against their way of life. This weekend, 15,000 believers are expected to descent upon Hartford, Connecticut, for the 37th annual Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) convention.

The Muslim American Society-sponsored conference, entitled, “Defending Religious Freedom: Understanding Shariah,” will take place from May 26-28. According to Religion News Service, the event is the second largest annual event for Muslims in the U.S., behind the Islamic Society of North America’s annual gathering (the latter event attracts 30,000+ people).

A Mississippi sixth-grader whose brother is serving in Afghanistan was told by school officials to turn his T-shirt inside-out because of its anatomically correct depiction of the U.S. Marine Corps bulldog, the Marine Corps Times reported.

Jordan Griffith, 13, received the T-shirt as a gift from his older brother, Lance Cpl. Timothy Swann Jr., while he was on leave before deploying. The front of the shirt shows the dog’s head and body and reads, “If you are not the lead dog,” while the back shows a rear view of the animal and states, “The view never changes.”

“Jordan just idolizes Timothy,” their mother, Sandy Griffith, told the Marine Corps Times. “Timothy gave him the shirt and told him, ‘Always remember you’re a leader, not a follower.’”

But that’s apparently not the message officials at South Jones Elementary in Ellisville chose to focus on: According to the Times, they objected to the realistic rendering of the dog’s genitals. Griffith was told to either turn his shirt inside-out or have his parents bring him a new one.

Incensed, Sandy Griffith chose to pull her son out of class rather than have him swap shirts.

“The bond [between the brothers] is very uncanny,” she told Fox News. “If you want to talk about inappropriate and offensive, that was offensive to me.”

Tommy Parker, the school’s superintendent, insisted to the Times that despite the outrage, the decision had nothing to do with it being a Marine Corps shirt.

“We’re very pro-military,” he said. “We’re one of the most conservative places in the United States.”

A 1997 photograph has been unearthed showing Barack Obama marching in a tea-party-style parade, long before the tax-cutting, patriotic movement began, and despite Obama’s apparent disdain for “teabaggers,” as he has termed them.

“Yes, that really is Barack Obama wearing a regimental coat and carrying a tricorn hat in his hand,” writes John Sexton of Breitbart.com, which is publishing the photo. “And that flag behind him really is a Gadsden flag, with its serpent and its ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ slogan.”

Sexton notes, “In 2009, President Barack Obama reportedly called members of the tea party ‘teabaggers.’ It turns out that our fourth greatest president, first in so many things, may have been the first ‘teabagger’ himself.”

Breitbart.com explains the forgotten photo has been in plain view for fifteen years, explaining it appeared on the front page of Chicago’s Hyde Park Herald on July 9th, 1997, snapped by photographer Nancy Campbell Hays.

On orders from Barack Obama’s Department of Justice, officials with the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith have given permission for a 38-year-old man to use the women’s restrooms on campus.

The report comes from Campus Reform.org, which explained that the individual also is seeking to have someone pay for a sex reassignment surgery to change from male to female.

Already living as a female, the individual, identified in the report as Jennifer Braly, started using women’s restrooms on campus, but quickly was the subject of complaints from women who saw him there.

The university had tried to make accommodations, designating gender-neutral restrooms in some buildings.

Not good enough, however.

Braly filed a complaint with the Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice under Attorney General Eric Holder, school officials reported. The DOJ contacted the school.

“[T]he office of civil rights basically made its expectations through the attorney and the decision was made to respond to that direction,” said Mark Horn, the vice president of university relations. “[T]he DOJ complaint caused revisiting of our thinking.

“In the eyes of the law this individual [Braly] is entitled to use the bathroom that she identifies with,” Horn said.

The DOJ complaint was filed by Braly after the university told him to use any of the gender-neutral restrooms on campus.

“One problem to this is there are not unisex bathrooms in every building,” Braly wrote in an online essay about how other people should contribute to his surgery costs. “Especially the two main buildings where most of my classes are, so I have to go to a completely different building to use the restroom.”

While the university offered to convert other restrooms to gender-neutral, Braly said that wasn’t satisfactory.